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Flashing orange traffic safety lamps are commonplace along highways and waterways. Passive cones are often used to mark the boundaries or edges of roadways. They are used during road construction, traffic detours, and for emergency to route traffic through unfamiliar redirection. These passive cones are typically used over an entire 24-hour period, which includes darkness and may include poor visibility. Always on, or blinking, lights or reflectors are often used to define the border of a road that has temporarily changed and no longer follows the path that drivers expect or have become use to seeing.
Traffic is often controlled using large, trailer-like signs with electric generators or photocells that are towed behind a vehicle and left at the detour site. These signs create a large arrow that directs traffic, but the arrow does not guide the driver around a curve or through unfamiliar road courses. Similarly, nautical traffic entering a harbor is guided via buoys and shore-based lights, which when set upon the backdrop of terrestrial lighting, can be confusing. Similarly, emergency or temporary aircraft runways for military, civilian, police, and Coast Guard air equipment, both fixed wing and rotary wing, lack proper sequenced lights that designate direction and location of the runway. This invention provides a system that is both low in cost and easy to implement, one that can be deployed quickly when necessary to aid aviators when landing or taking off on open fields or highways.
Also, traditional magnesium-flame roadside flares are sometimes used by first responders and workers to alert drivers to the presence of an emergency or maintenance event. There has been movement away from use of flame flares as they result in fire danger, pollution, and toxic fumes. Electronic flares that shine brightly on the roadside have begun to replace these ignited devices. However, frequently during a maintenance or emergency event there are numerous vehicles with roof-top and bumper-level red, orange, blue lamps flashing. This “light noise” can introduce confusion to an approaching driver.
In recent years, electronic roadside flares have been developed as alternatives to magnesium flame flares, reflectors, cones, markers and other previously used flares and marker devices.